When a member says they are not receiving your forum's emails, the cause is almost always one of a small number of things. It is a delivery failure recorded in your email history, incomplete email authorization on your domain, or filtering on the recipient's mail system. This guide works through each possibility in order, starting with the checks you can do yourself and ending with what to ask the recipient's IT administrator to do. Stop as soon as you find the cause.

First, narrow the scope

Work out how wide the problem is before checking anything else.

• One member is missing email that other members receive. The cause is almost always on that member's side: their email address, their notification settings, or filtering at their mail system.
• Everyone at one email domain, such as every member at a company or a university, is missing email. That mail system is filtering or quarantining your forum's email, usually because your domain's authorization is incomplete. Do step 2, then step 4.
• No one is receiving email, or your outgoing address has changed to noresponse@websitetoolbox.com. Your domain is not authorized to send email. Go straight to step 2.

Step 1: Check the email history for that recipient

The email history page records every email your forum tries to send, newest first, with a status and a plain-language explanation. Search for the member's email address and read their most recent entries.

• Sent means our servers handed the email to the recipient's mail server successfully. If the member still cannot find it, their mail system filtered or quarantined it after accepting it. Do step 3.
• Delivery failed means the recipient's mail server rejected the email. Click What to do below the status for the recommended action, and look the provider's response up in Email delivery error messages and how to resolve them, which covers the common Microsoft 365 rejections.
• Skipped means your forum deliberately did not send the email, for example because the member has notifications turned off, has unsubscribed, or has already read the posts. The status names the reason. Do step 5.
• Queued means the email is waiting to be sent. Bulk emails go out a few at a time so that providers do not treat them as spam, so a large send stays queued for a while.

The email history keeps the last 6 months of email. If the email the member is asking about is older than that, work through the remaining steps instead.

Step 2: Confirm your domain is authorized to send email

Your forum can only send from your own domain once its SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are published. Open the Notifications Settings page and look at the Outgoing Email Address option. A green check mark next to a record means that record is published and verified. A missing or red status means that record still needs to be published.

You can complete or repair the whole setup from the email authorization setup page. It walks you through each record with step-by-step instructions for common providers such as Microsoft 365, Cloudflare, and GoDaddy. You can also reach it from Notifications Settings by clicking Connect your email, then Start setup, and from your domain's dashboard. Authorizing Website Toolbox to send email explains what each record is and why it matters.

Until authorization is complete, your forum quietly falls back to sending from noresponse@websitetoolbox.com. Providers treat that address as an unverified bulk sender, so those emails land in spam folders or are filtered away without any warning to you or the member. Website Toolbox is not authorized to send email explains this fallback in detail.

After publishing or fixing a record, check the green check marks again. It can take up to an hour for Website Toolbox to detect a DNS change.

Step 3: Check the spam, junk, and bulk mail folders

Ask the member to look in their Spam or Junk folder and mark any forum email as not spam. In Gmail they should also check the Updates and Promotions category tabs, and in Outlook the Other tab and the Focused / Other split. Emails go into the spam folder and I'm not able to receive emails cover the consumer-side checks and the subscription settings that control what is sent.

Step 4: Check the recipient's email quarantine

Company and school mail systems routinely hold bulk or unverified mail in a quarantine instead of delivering or bouncing it. The email history shows Sent, but the member never sees the email anywhere, including their spam folder. Checking the email quarantine on popular email systems explains how a member or their IT administrator checks the quarantine on Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Proofpoint, Mimecast, and Barracuda, and how to release a held message.

Step 5: Check the member's subscription settings

If the email in question is a topic notification, the member may have simply stopped following the topic or category, or chosen a daily or weekly summary instead of immediate notifications. Users aren't receiving some topic notification emails explains the subscription mechanics, and the email history will show a Skipped entry naming the reason when your forum deliberately did not send a notification.

Step 6: Ask the recipient's IT administrator to allowlist your domain

If a corporate or university recipient still has nothing after steps 1 through 5, their mail administrator needs to release the held message and allowlist your sending domain. Send their IT administrator these details, all of which you can find in your forum's admin area.

• Your forum's sending domain, which is the domain part of the Outgoing Email Address on the Notifications Settings page.
• The websitetoolbox selector. Email from your domain is signed with the CNAME record websitetoolbox._domainkey, which points to websitetoolbox._domainkey.websitetoolbox.com. Your forum's SPF record authorizes mailers.websitetoolbox.com. Both are set up through the email authorization setup page.
• The exact quarantined message, taken from the email history page: the recipient's address, the subject, and the date. That lets their administrator find it in a message trace or quarantine queue in seconds.

Tell them that releasing the single message fixes that email, and that allowlisting the sending domain is the permanent fix for every future email.

Still stuck

If you have worked through the steps above and the member still is not receiving email, contact us and include the following so we can investigate without a round of questions.

• Your forum's URL.
• The member's email address.
• Their most recent entry from the email history page, including the status and any provider response text.
• What you have already checked, such as the green check marks on the Notifications Settings page, or a quarantine check by the member's IT administrator.